Although he won the Nobel Prize primarily for his trenchant, probing fiction, J.M. Coetzee is also an accomplished and insightful literary critic. In this thought-provoking collection of 23 pieces, the South African offers detailed examinations of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, and Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Here too are four insightful essays on Samuel Beckett, plus perceptive commentary on Goethe, Daniel Defoe, Irène Némirovsky, Robert Walser, Philip Roth, Zbigniew Herbert, Patrick White, and Ford Madox Ford.

"Coetzee again demonstrates his range and precision as a literary critic and his gift for rendering challenging material accessible."—Booklist (starred review)